The irony is sharp enough to hurt. Americans are driving less and using less gas when we do drive. U.S. carbon pollution is down. Just about every car dealership in America is offering affordable, practical high gas mileage or zero gas mileage cars. Automakers are making them and the sales numbers show that Americans are buying them. Meanwhile, the Obama administration and automakers are poised to do even better with new standards that will double mileage again and slash pollution from our cars and trucks.
America is on the road to moving beyond oil, but the oil industry hasn’t gotten the message, and there’s no better evidence than its obsession with tar sands.

We don’t need tar-sands oil from Canada, yet Big Oil is determined to force it down our throats anyway — or at least force us to let them pipe through our nation so they can export it abroad. And now we’ve got some pretty shocking evidence of just how high a price we could end up paying for their greed.

In 2010, more than 30 miles of the Kalamazoo River was transformed into an environmental disaster zone by a cracked tar sands pipeline and a tar sands pipeline company that neglected to turn off its pumps. Since then, a monumental $700 million cleanup effort has removed more than a million gallons of tar sands crude, along with 17 million gallons of polluted water, and 190,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil and debris. Last week, after two years, the EPA officially reopened the affected section of the river.

Now, though, a just-released in-depth report from Inside Climate News today shows that this massive cleanup effort was in fact a debacle — a failure that reinforces the reputation of tar sands as the dirtiest oil on earth, exposes the weakness of regulatory oversight, and casts an ominous shadow across the thousands of rivers and streams that millions of Americans who live downstream of proposed tar sands pipelines depend on.

Tar sand spills prove even more toxic and difficult to clean up than typical oil spills. That’s because the heavy mixture of oil sand sinks in water, which means that tactics like skimming the surface can’t be used. Instead, remediators must try to recover the oil from the bottoms of rivers, reservoirs, or wherever it has spilled — a far more difficult task. Tar sands already contain high concentrations of heavy metals, and chemical diluents mixed in for transport are also known to be carcinogenic. EPA lab tests following a December 2011 oil leak in Colorado found concentrations of cancer-causing benzene as high as 2,000 parts per billion in the creek where the leak occurred — well above the 5 ppb national drinking water standard.

This would be bad enough if such spills were rare occurrences — but they’re not. In the past two months alone, three separate tar sands pipelines have reported spills in Canada. Enbridge Inc., whose pipe leaked into the Kalamazoo, reported a spill of 1,450 barrels of oil-sand crude in eastern Alberta just last week, while two other companies cited spills of 3,000 and 5,000 barrels respectively, the former into a reservoir used by a nearby small town.

And Canadian tar sands spills are not limited to Canada. Since May 2011, three major tar sands spills have occurred in North Dakota, Montana, and Colorado. The North Dakota spill was the twelfth from TransCanada’s Keystone I pipeline during its first year of operation.

Why are tar sands pipes so accident prone? To pass through the pipelines, tar sands must be brought to extreme temperatures and pressures. Add sand and powerful chemicals to this equation, and you’ve got a formula for corroding and rupturing steel pipes, leading to breaches that spill toxic goo into aquifers and rivers.

That would be bad enough if oil companies did a good job of maintaining and monitoring these pipeline systems — but they do not. All of the most significant spills over the last two years were discovered not by the oil companies, but by ordinary citizens. The new report documents how prior to the Michigan spill, Enbridge conducted an “integrity management assessment” with an ultrasonic in-line inspection device. The disastrous spill happened anyway. The same is true of other companies whose pipelines ruptured.

Given the environmental and health consequences of the Enbridge spill, as well as the millions of dollars still being spent to clean it up, Michigan Representative Fred Upton’s position on the subject is puzzling at best. After the Kalamazoo spill occurred in his district, he did cosponsor a bill that would hold companies accountable for reporting incidents. But since then, he’s come out in support of rebuilding the Enbridge pipeline and constructing even more pipelines, including Keystone XL. Given the inevitability of more spills, Upton is apparently willing to put the health and home of his constituents at risk, for dubious benefits. In a recent interview, Upton claims his constituents will be protected from gasoline price spikes “with the expansion and rebuilding to a number of refineries here.” It seems he’s forgotten that the Keystone XL pipeline will transport tar sands crude to refineries in Texas for export overseas, making it unlikely that anyone in his district will benefit.

Frequent tar sands spills and their devastating effects in places like Michigan make it clear that by continuing to develop tar sands we’re not taking a risk that we will poison our water and land — we’re ensuring it. And all for oil that we don’t really need.

Follow Michael Brune on Twitter: www.twitter.com/bruneski

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By Linh Dinh

  

It’s all going according to plan, this transformation of the US into a police state and Third-World nation, but what’s meant by “Third World,” exactly? A Third World country is one that is poor, with inadequate infrastructure, an obscene wealth gap and a corrupt government. America is by far the most-indebted nation on earth, with a record-setting trade deficit, so we are, in effect, much poorer than Greece, Zimbabwe, Somalia or any other basket case, but it hasn’t become manifest because we have guns, missiles and drones pointing in all directions. Using our gargantuan military to hold the world hostage, we receive more foreign aids, in the form of debts, than all the other nations combined. Riding a nuclear-armed mobility scooter, America is a gross welfare queen barging down the world’s sidewalk, but this is how an empire is supposed to work, many will smirk, and they are right, of course, until this extortion racket falls apart, and soon enough. Preparing for the inevitable, our ruling class is becoming more belligerent abroad, in a last ditch effort to prolong its advantages, and nastier at home, to slap down domestic rage at a sinking standard of living. Splurging beyond our means for decades, we will revert to the universal means, and not because we care about justice or equality, but because we don’t have a choice.

Just as there are pockets of First World opulence and luxury in even the most dismal Third World countries, rich nations also have stretches of Third World squalidness and destitution, but Third World isn’t all bad. Not by far. To survive on little requires enterprise, resourcefulness and cooperation, virtues that will emerge and even blossom as we slide downward. Ubiquitous in most Third World countries, peddlers will make a comeback here, and the black market will thrive. As globalism recedes, the local will rise. Instead of being slaves to huge corporations, we will become tiny businessmen, as long as we’re not hunted down, then fined or locked up. Of course, as work become scarcer and scarcer and manual labor even cheaper than now, many of us will become slaves to our neighbors, as house servants. You will learn to cook, clean, wash, sweep, mop, iron and massage from sunup to lights out, every day. Dressed like Lady Gaga, many mothers and daughters will loiter at street corners.

Back to the positive aspect. Each home can become a store or a restaurant. Each car is a gypsy cab. In totalitarian Vietnam, the government actually gives its people much more leeway to conduct petty business than is allowed in America. A private home can display a table with, say, five cans of soda, two brands of cigarettes and some candies, and that’s a store, though nobody is manning it most of the time. To get service, you might have to shout. It’s not their only source of income, but this pee wee initiative does bring in a buck or two a day, so it’s better than nothing. The adjacent home might sell bags of rice. A third is a two-table café serving coffee, soda and beer, and if you want to eat something, the proprietor will run down the street to get it for you, for a modest surcharge. If you have just one van, you can pick up people at a predetermined spot, where many other vans, unaffiliated to you, also go. Driving passengers to another city, you can also snare business along the way. At just about any street corner, men wait on motorcycles for clients. You negotiate a price for where you want to go, then hop on the back. Just a handful of rides a day will earn each man enough to feed his family. It won’t be steak, but he is self-reliant and his own boss. There is no welfare, food stamps or Social Security in a Third World country, no safety net outside of your extended family.

My Philadelphia neighborhood, the Italian Market, has long boasted or flaunted Third World aspects. In its heydays thirty or forty years ago, it resembled Naples, one of the most Third World-like cities in all of Europe, and now it evokes charming Chihuahua. Here, Italian, Mexican, Chinese and Vietnamese-Americans coexist, and within a five-minute walk from my door, you can get a live chicken, duck or even rabbit, goat meat, ox tails, an Italian tripe sandwich, a beef tongue taco or a Vietnamese rice porridge with pork innards. I’ve had better pho here than in Hanoi, its birthplace, and I’m not kidding. Third World business arrangements are also common. To get Mexican clients, a Chinese-owned barber shop has a Mexican barber, with the split 6-4, in the house’s favor, though the Spanish-speaking haircutter keeps her own tips. Half a mile from me, there’s a restaurant that’s half Mexican, half Vietnamese. Splitting the overhead, two families share a kitchen and operate under one roof.

Left alone, we will figure out a way to scrape by, but it remains to be seen to what degree, and for how long, the government will try to prevent us from surviving on our own. One can say that the United States is becoming a police state because it is turning into a Third World country. Already, choppers snake through skyscraper canyons and tanks roll down main streets. The police state protects and advances the interests of the ruling class, which in our case is the military banking complex, and since an informal market nibbles at the profits of banks and corporations, you can expect their henchmen, cops and regulators, to stomp hard on us smallest fries. (Underpaid in a collapsed economy, cops will also use these opportunities to shake us down, so that’s a kind of tax we’ll have to pay.) In any case, it appears that as we become poorer and thinner, not to mention more enterprising or devious, and more colorful too, since everyday will be casual Friday, we will have to fend off our bullying state, if not the gangs that rise up in its place.

Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, and a novel, Love Like Hate. He’s tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, State of the Union.

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By Tara Lohan, AlterNet

 The Oscar-nominated director of Gasland, Josh Fox, released a new 18-minute video that takes his critics to task and issues a call to action on fracking. The Sky Is Pink packs a ton of information into 18 minutes. The film debunks industry lies, like those promoted by former PA governor and Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge, now a gas industry lobbyist. Fox details the “wholesale industrialization” of communities that occurs with fracking and the many risks, not just from polluted water. But don’t just take Fox’s word for it — the film also reveals leaked industry documents that shows that industry does in fact know just how risky their business really is. And if this all sounds very reminiscent of Big Tobacco swearing their product is safe even when they know it’s not — well, that’s because the fracking industry has hired the same PR firm. Check out the video below (or at this link).

 

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